My Journal colleague Charles Brunt had a fascinating tale in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal about the Bosque del Apache wildlife refuge’s struggle with elk. Located on the Rio Grande in central New Mexico, the Bosque is famous among birders, a winter home to a flock of some 10,000 sandhill cranes. It’s always been my personal …
Continue reading ‘The arrival of the elk – another “what is nature?” story’ »
Ever since I first heard about “atmospheric rivers” from Cliff Dahm, the biologist who until recently headed science efforts for the Delta Stewardship Council, I’ve been asking every scientist who I heard talk about them whether they can make it all the way to New Mexico. AR’s are these amazing storms that blast California like a …
In early twentieth century America, there were playground activists: Playground activists in cities across the nation, drawing from prevailing theories in psychology and sociology, championed organized play as the path toward stronger bodies and higher morals. That’s from Matthew Klingle’s fascinating Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (The Lamar Series in Western History).
Brett Walton’s got another good story about what happens when communities creatively confront coming water shortages and take control over their own adaptation. This one’s out of Kansas, where folks in the Northwest Kansas Groundwater Management District are on the cusp of agreeing amongst themselves to a 20 percent groundwater pumping curtailment, shared, to stretch out …
From the Texas Tribune: “Without immediate and direct action from the White House and U.S. Department of State, Texans along the Rio Grande will continue to suffer from a lack of available water,” Perry wrote.
Newspaper people don’t become newspaper people because they want to get rich, or because they want to be famous, they do so because they believe in what newspapers do. TJ Sullivan, in his explanation of why he went to Roger Ebert’s funeral
At dinner the other night, one of the people at the table commented about the risk we face when the Ogallala Aquifer, beneath the great plains, runs out, which he’d heard would happen in 20 years. Without taking action now to begin regrowing the native grasses needed to hold the plains in place, he’d heard, …
Continue reading ‘Why “when the Ogallala runs out” isn’t the right way to think about this’ »
It almost felt like a setup when Steve Harris asked me to talk at a conference about how “water is for cooperating over.” I make a meager but steady living these days writing about water conflict. And yet…. [B]efore I got to Ghost Ranch on Friday afternoon, I took the turnoff to Abiquiu Reservoir. In …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: in the midst of drought, signs of water cooperation’ »
When I left Pasadena nearly 25 years ago, my water mentor Tim Brick was hard at work on the problem of restoring a semblance of riverness to the Arroyo Seco, the channel that defines that Southern California city’s western edge. Via a visit by our old mutual friend Larry Wilson to the confluence of the …